“So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary—how am I to resolve them?”

“definitions belong to the definer, not the defined, & I no longer wished to have my life & death foretold by others. I had endured too much to be reduced to an idea. Onto that pyre I threw so many, many words - that entire untrue literature of the past which had shackled & subjugated my as surely as the spiked iron collars & leg locks & jagged basils & balls & chains & headshaving - that had so long denied me my free voice & the stories I needed to tell. I no longer wished to read lies as to who & why I was. I knew who I was”

“Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.”

“Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him in his youth.”

“Remember, this thing is small. It's not like the wolfships. It'll ride over the waves, not crash through them. So we're safe as houses."He wasn't sure about the last two statements, but they seemed logical to him.”

“there are times when life's ends are so raveled that reason and sense cry out that we stop and gather them together again before we can proceed”

“They didn't put two and two together. They didn't even know what they knew. I don't know what's the matter with people, they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!”